The unit is designed for educators interested in Wabanaki Studies, Maine Studies and/or for educators planning a visit to the Abbe Museum.
Students use events from the Abbe Museum On-Line Timeline of Wabanaki History to demonstrate how Wabanaki peoples have maintained their cultural identity over time. The on-line timeline is a digital recreation of the Timeline Exhibit: from the Present to the Past at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. The on-line timeline includes over 100 entries in addition to primary source documents and definitions of key words.
Students demonstrate this knowledge in a variety of written and visual products by taking on the persona of an independent filmmaker. As independent filmmakers, students will write a movie synopsis, create a storyboard for a movie and produce an iMovie.

With European's arrival, Maine native people's social and economic structure and identity was fundamentally destroyed. Disease, combined with the fur trade with its introduction of guns and alcohol and the increasing number of Europeans clearing and farming the land, brought devastating changes to the Wabanaki.

With the coming of the Europeans to the lands upon which the Wabanakis lived, hunted, and fished, many disastrous changes took place. In the battle between England and France on New World soil, the Wabanaki people suffered and struggled in the face of war, disease, famine, and dislocation. As these two countries fought in Europe, so did their missionaries and colonists fight in the New World to religiously convert the Wabanakis, in order to gain their trust and alliances. The many years of bloody fighting took their toll on the Wabanakis, who ended up losing their young, their elders, their way of life, and their ancestral lands.

"Land has always been the Native people’s most valuable possession. It has provided the base for his existence, his religion and his society. Today with what little land the Native people own continues to serve at least as a Tribal center to which individuals can relate and thus maintain a sense of identity in an alien world which all too often has tried to take from Native people everything they possess including their identity."

The National Park Service and the Abbe Museum collaborated to create this traveling kit. This hands-on kit uses student-centered activities and tactile elements to introduce students to the richness of Passamaquoddy culture and history. This kit does not attempt to fully teach all Passamaquoddy history. Rather, these lessons and activities should be used as an introduction that will inspire you and your students to learn more about Passamaquoddy and other Wabanaki history.